Pepper Spray Friday
by David Atkins
The Occupy Movement isn’t the only situation in which potentially troublesome individuals camp out in public or semi-public spaces overnight. In fact, it happens every year with increasingly dangerous consequences. The toll of Black Friday already includes several deaths by trampling of unruly mobs, shootings of crazed shoppers, multiple cases of paralysis, pregnancy complications including miscarriage, and a variety of other violence.
That is 100% more death, paralysis, miscarriage, shooting and violence than the entirety of the Occupy Movement is responsible for.
But something tells me that we won’t be about to see police officers standing in front of Black Friday protesters, using tear gas on the crowds while “fearing for their safety.”
That’s because free speech isn’t sacred in America. As George Bush proved shortly after the 9/11 attacks, consumerism is America’s religion. Peacefully speaking out against the financial sector will be met with police in riot gear and debilitating “compliance devices,” but violent mobs of shoppers are free to trample one another on the holy altar of profit.
As Milton Friedman famously said:
The characteristic feature of action through political channels is that it tends to require or enforce substantial conformity. The great advantage of the market, on the other hand, is that it permits wide diversity. It is, in political terms, a system of proportional representation. Each man can vote, as it were, for the color of tie he wants and get it; he does not have to see what color-the majority wants and then, if he is in the minority, submit.
The non-conformity of Black Friday at WalMart is true diversity and democracy, even on pain of death. The conformist fascist protesters in New York and and elsewhere must be met with pepper spray and the full force of America-loving riot police, lest the nation itself be hurt by questioning the “free” market.
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